9,202 research outputs found
Connected Women: How Mobile Can Support Women's Economic and Social Empowerment
This report explores how mobile services provided by Vodafone and the Vodafone Foundation are enabling women to seize new opportunities and improve their lives. Accenture Sustainability Services were commissioned to conduct research on the services and to assess their potential social and economic impact if they were widely available across Vodafone's markets by 2020. It showcases the projects and the work of those involved and also poses the question -- what would the benefit to women and to society at large be if projects such as these were taken to scale and achieved an industrialscale of growth? This reflects the Foundation's commitment not solely to the development of pilots but rather the Trustees' ambition to see projects which lead to transformational change. In order to understand this more deeply, the Report looks at the benefits for women and society and providessome financial modelling for how the engagement of commercial players could achieve industrial, sustainable growth in these areas. Accenture has provided the modelling and, given the public benefit and understanding which the report seeks to generate, these are shared openly for all in the mobile industry to understand and share. It is the Trustees' hope that the collaboration with Oxford University and Accenture in the delivery of this Report will stimulate not only the expansion of existing charitable programmes but will also seed other philanthropic, social enterprise or commercial initiatives
A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making
Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires
Emerging issues and current trends in assistive technology use 2007-1010: practising, assisting and enabling learning for all
Following an earlier review in 2007, a further review of the academic literature relating to the uses of assistive technology (AT) by children and young people was completed, covering the period 2007-2011. As in the earlier review, a tripartite taxonomy: technology uses to train or practise, technology uses to assist learning and technology uses to enable learning, was used in order to structure the findings. The key markers for research in this field and during these three years were user involvement, AT on mobile mainstream devices, the visibility of AT, technology for interaction and collaboration, new and developing interfaces and inclusive design principles. The paper concludes by locating these developments within the broader framework of the Digital Divide
Ensuring Language Access Equity in Virginia Government Services
This research report addresses the growing language needs of multilingual communities and people with LEP within the scope of the Appropriations Act, and the language equity and access for individuals with disabilities living in the Commonwealth of Virginia given the need for accessibility for people with disabilities (PWD) and the charge given within Executive Order 47. This report also assesses how the needs of people with LEP and PWD are currently being met and provides recommendations to implement a state government language access policy that ensures equitable access to state services for people with limited language proficiency, including multilingual speakers, people with disabilities, and those with low literacy levels
IFIP TC 13 Seminar: trends in HCI proceedings, March 26, 2007, Salamanca (Spain)
Actas del 13o. Seminario de la International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), celebrado en Salamanca el 26 de marzo de 2007, sobre las nuevas lĂneas de investigaciĂłn en la interacciĂłn hombre-mĂĄquina, gestiĂłn del conocimiento y enseñanza por la Web
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Best Practice Report on Widening Participation in Higher Education Study through Open Educational Resources
This document provides an overview of the literature and includes the full set of case studies provided by partners describing how OER can or might influence participation in higher education in different states across Europe.
Executive summary
1. The level of participation and achievement within higher education is viewed as crucial for social and economic development. While widening participation in higher education is a goal of all 46 countries within the European Higher Education Area there is no common or simple definition of what widening participation means in practice. In principle it is a variable mix between how many people, what type of people and what type of achievement those people gain through engaging in higher education level study.
2. Whether from the perspective of the learner or a higher education institution it is possible to consider the availability, accessibility, affordability and acceptability of taught educational provision and educational resources. A large number of physical, social, economic, cultural and psychological factors or barriers influence how many and what types of people participate and what achievements they gain.
3. There has been a growth in interest in open education and open educational resources. This interest in openness both builds upon the pioneering work of open and distance learning institutions to address widening participation, many of which participated in this study, and also extends the concept of what it means to participate or engage in higher education level study.
4. Open educational resources come in many forms and their availability, accessibility, affordability and acceptability vary depending on the licence used and the technology employed to create and deliver them. As with participation in higher education there are a number of multi-faceted and multi-layered reasons why people may be excluded from using open educational resources.
5. The evidence from the pioneering work of the partners in this study is that open and distance learning offers great scope to expand the availability and accessibility of higher education study where traditional campus based institutions cannot take on many more students as quickly or where students wish to âlearn why they earnâ as life long learners. It can also be more affordable and acceptable although this depends on individual contexts in individual countries. The modular nature of their programmes also provides more flexibility for there to be higher education study achievement below a first cycle Bachelors qualification.
6. The partnersâ work with publishing open educational resources indicate that this can also greatly increase the opportunities for people to engage with informal (self-organised and non credit bearing) or non-formal (peer group or employer organised and non credit bearing) higher education study. Such opportunities are able to provide better bridges into formal study for those groups currently excluded from higher education study and better bridges with employers and voluntary organisations seeking more customised educational experiences for their employees or members.
7. These developments around openness and in particular open educational resources are leading the partners in this study to closely examine their business models and modes of operation in terms of how many people they recruit and teach, what type of people they recruit and teach, the modes by which they provide educational resources and structure educational experiences and what constitutes successful engagement or participation.
8. New policies and practices are required at all levels in the higher education system to address issues of openness and open educational resources in higher education study and the role that both can play in increasing and widening engagement and participation
Enhancing Public Access to Online Rulemaking Information
One of the most significant powers exercised by federal agencies is their power to make rules. Given the importance of agency rulemaking, the process by which agencies develop rules has long been subject to procedural requirements aiming to advance democratic values of openness and public participation. With the advent of the digital age, government agencies have engaged in increasing efforts to make rulemaking information available online as well as to elicit public participation via electronic means of communication. How successful are these efforts? How might they be improved? In this article, I investigate agenciesâ efforts to make rulemaking information available online. Drawing on a review of current agency uses of the Internet, a systematic survey of regulatory agenciesâ websites, and interviews with managers at a variety of federal regulatory agencies, I identify both existing âbest practicesâ as well as opportunities for continued improvement. The findings of this research suggest that there exist both considerable differences in how well different agencies are making rulemaking information available online as well as significant opportunities for the diffusion of best-practice innovations that some agencies have adopted. This research also provides a basis for seven recommendations that I offer for enhancing both the accessibility and quality of rulemaking through online technology. A commitment to well-accepted democratic principles applicable to regulatory agencies should lead federal web designers to strive to create websites that are as accessible to ordinary citizens, including individuals with limited English proficiency, vision impairments, and low-bandwidth connections, as they are to the sophisticated repeat players in Washington policymaking circles
Language technologies for a multilingual Europe
This volume of the series âTranslation and Multilingual Natural Language Processingâ includes most of the papers presented at the Workshop âLanguage Technology for a Multilingual Europeâ, held at the University of Hamburg on September 27, 2011 in the framework of the conference GSCL 2011 with the topic âMultilingual Resources and Multilingual Applicationsâ, along with several additional contributions. In addition to an overview article on Machine Translation and two contributions on the European initiatives META-NET and Multilingual Web, the volume includes six full research articles. Our intention with this workshop was to bring together various groups concerned with the umbrella topics of multilingualism and language technology, especially multilingual technologies. This encompassed, on the one hand, representatives from research and development in the field of language technologies, and, on the other hand, users from diverse areas such as, among others, industry, administration and funding agencies. The Workshop âLanguage Technology for a Multilingual Europeâ was co-organised by the two GSCL working groups âText Technologyâ and âMachine Translationâ (http://gscl.info) as well as by META-NET (http://www.meta-net.eu)
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